On the Thursday night of Carnival, stand-up comedian Mitch Hedberg came to Carnegie Mellon to perform under the midway’s Mainstage tent. The audience of approximately 1,200 easily overflowed the seating capacity in the tent. He began his set commenting on the location and explaining that he would do his tent jokes later.
Canadian comic Lynne Shawcroft opened the evening of comedy shortly after 8 pm, warming the audience up for Hedberg, her husband. Only a few hecklers didn’t seem to enjoy her quips. She frequently referred to Hedberg’s greater popularity, usually with mock-envy.

Hedberg’s comedy had a more individual style. Though a few people seemed unimpressed, he had most of the audience rolling with laughter. His particular brand of randomness keeps his listeners on their toes. At one point, after a short non-sequitur that appeared to be the beginning of a new bit, Hedberg immediately started into a completely different train of thought about vending machines. Taken aback by the quick shift, the audience laughed hard enough to cause Hedberg to forget which bit he was doing for a few moments while he went on with other jokes. When he returned to the topic of vending machines, the audience showed they remembered with another uproar.

Hedberg’s delivery is probably the reason for his fame. His flat tone of voice and deliberate diction, lacking in contractions, lend solid comedic value to innocent puns — like expecting ant farms to grow crops. He hides his facial expressions behind sunglasses, long blonde hair, and the microphone so that the audience can never anticipate the punch line.

Hedberg’s brevity is the soul of his wit. Each of his bits is short enough that none warrants segue to the next. Instead, he simply spouts jokes as though he is reciting items on a grocery list, sometimes moving on to a new bit while the audience still ponders the last.

Senior computer science major Jay Pujara commented, “While many of his jokes were very trite, they only served to contrast some of the more thought-provoking jokes. By the time you caught the punch line, Hedberg had shot off two or three more jokes.”

Some people, most notably Hedberg himself, seemed to think he was having an off night. He followed many of his less successful jokes with statements like “… that joke was not funny. Why did I think that that [expletive] was funny?”

He was quick to apologize for his relative failures, noting that he had not been able to drink before the show.

“Drinking for comedians is like stretching for athletes,” he explained. He also insisted that, despite appearances, he does not use other drugs before he performs, arguing that they would leave him far too paranoid and confused to deliver jokes to a large group of strangers.

Hedberg clearly had a fan base present. When he rhetorically asked the audience, “What do you think of frilly toothpicks?” an audience member finished the joke with him, yelling, “I’m for them.” Later, others called out key words to identify favorite bits for him to deliver.

Near the end of his set, Hedberg offered a joke that summed up many of the trends of the evening. In between two totally unrelated lines, pointing at an area just outside the tent, he announced, “If you want to talk to me after the show, I will be really [expletive] surprised.” The audience, as usual, doubled over with laughter.
Hedberg showed an appreciative audience that he does not merely think of funny ideas, he thinks of ways to make any old idea funny. His humor fit quite well in the atmosphere of carnival.

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